


3am

by TheOtherView



Category: Carmilla (Web Series)
Genre: F/F, Fluff, first date fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-18
Updated: 2017-10-18
Packaged: 2019-01-18 20:49:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,370
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12395964
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheOtherView/pseuds/TheOtherView
Summary: "I'm in a bit of a pickle."(Based on the dialogue prompt, "It's three in the morning." Laura's POV.)





	3am

**Author's Note:**

> Have a one-shot based on the dialogue prompt: "It's three in the morning." I had a lot of fun with this one, I hope you have as much fun reading it!

"It’s three in the fucking morning,” the voice over the phone says.    
  
I’m standing in boots full of rain, clinging to the payphone as if it’s not on the verge of falling apart.   
  
“I’m kind of in a pickle,” I say as if I’m not on the verge of falling apart.    
  
“As are most people at three in the morning, good night,” the voice says. I hear a shuffle on the other end of the line and my heart sinks into my stomach. Why does she have to be so frickin’ callous?   
  
“Wait! Wait!” I yell.    
  
“What!?” she grumbles.    
  
“Can you please pick me up? The subway isn’t running and I’m stuck all the way downtown and if I call my dad he will never, ever let me outside again.”    
  
There’s a long, stressful pause between us and I begin to wonder if she’s hung up. I wonder how long my quarters have bought me and if I’m truly stuck. Stuck, in front of a grimy gas station, praying over an early breakfast of gummy worms that I don’t get mugged.    
  
“Where are you?” she finally asks.    
  
“The Eagle Gas down on Ponca,” I say, so quickly the words almost fold together.    
  
“Stay there,” she says with an exaggerated sigh.    
  
I begin to jump up and down so hard, the rain comes flowing from my boots. I slam the phone down on it’s hook and grin. I’m going home, I think. I’m going to be safe, and warm, and dry.    
  
And it only takes Carmilla an hour to show up.    
  
I’m sitting on the curb, sharing my gummy worms with a bulky, grisled man named ‘Tiger’. He’s telling me about how he knits with his mother on the weekends when the old Corvette comes tearing through the parking lot.    
  
“That your girl?” Tiger asks.    
  
“She’s not mine,” I say.    
  
He nods in an appreciative way. As if our friendship is something to marvel at. I probably know him better than I do her. I stand up and dust off the back of my jeans as if it’ll do anything for the mud.    
  
“Be careful out there, kid,” Tiger says.    
  
“I will! Thanks! Tell your mom I said hi.”    
  
“Will do!”   
  
I collide with the seat of the car to find it’s padded with probably every towel we keep in the apartment. My boots find a safe place to nestle among old cans of soda as another towel is flung into my lap.    
  
“If you get mud on my seats, I’ll kill you.”   
  
“Thanks for picking me up,” I say, pretending I didn’t hear her. My thanks fall on deaf ears as she starts to turn up the radio. This is how we are. There’s some form of care there, between the two of us. But it seems to lie in a whole different dimension most of the time. In reality we fight, mostly over our apartment, and the rules she loves to break. I’ve tried to talk to her, but usually I get silence or hungover grunts.    
  
“I’m guessing your date didn’t go as planned,” she says and I’m surprised she remembered.    
  
“Nope,” I say. “She stood me up. I went to the Adonis to see Kirsch since it was next door, but I lost track of time, and my phone died. So I tried to catch the subway, but it wasn’t running. So then I tried to walk home, but I got lost. And now here we are.”    
  
“Quite the story,” she says. At this point I’m shaking. I can’t tell if it’s from the chill of the autumn rain or the fact that I got stood up again.    
  
“Are you okay?”    
  
And this is the part where she cares, just for a second. Enough to make me feel safe and warm in a car full of half-functioning air conditioning. And that’s when I boil over with tears and start loudly sobbing like an idiot.    
  
“Hey, hey, hey,” she coos softly. A hand goes from the steering wheel to my shoulder. Her fingers are bony and hard, but gentle all the while. “We’ll get home and you can have some cocoa or whatever, and you’ll be okay.”    
  
It’s hardly reassuring. “I just don’t understand why,” I say between harsh breaths.    
  
“Should have gone on a date with me,” she mumbles. She sucks on her bottom lip as if she just revealed her deepest, darkest secret.   
  
“Is now really the time to joke about that?!”    
  
There’s a pause. Long and strained. She takes her hand away from my shoulder and puts it in her lap. It takes me a minute, then another. It finally clicks and I could start my crying all over.    
  
“Wait were you weren’t joking, were you?”    
  
“Not exactly, cupcake.”   
  
“Holy hufflepuff.”    
  
There’s no way, it couldn’t be. And of all times to tell me, she chooses now? I take a deep breath and shake my head.    
  
“Holy frickin Hufflepuff,” is all I manage.    
  
“How about we don’t make a thing out of this,” Carmilla says.    
  
“How can we  _ not _ make a thing out of this? You asked me on a date what, twice? And I  _ laughed _ at you! Carm, I am so sorry!”    
  
“Apology accepted now can we please move on.” She’s annoyed more than she is hurt, or at least that’s the way she wants me to see it. I try to keep quiet for a while as she speeds the car up and nearly runs a red light. Fifteen cruel minutes of silence went on before she finally spoke again:    
  
“Are you hungry?”    
  
“What?”    
  
“Are you hungry?” She asks a little louder.   
  
“Yes, please,” I reply.    
  
She wordlessly turns the car down a street I know doesn’t head for home. I almost question it, but I know she’ll threaten to kick me out of the car if I do. I leave it be, sit back, and enjoy the ride.   
  
\--   
  
After about ten minutes I see a neon sign like a beacon of hope. It reads ‘King Mackey’s Burgers’ in a vibrant pink. I don’t like the looks of it just by the cloud of insects buzzing around the neon. Just pulling into the parking lot feels greasy and grotesque. Still, for some reason, I trust Carmilla. It’s not like I have the cleanest of diets anyhow. She pulls us into a spot and we stare at the oversized menu. There’s a bunch of pictures of pristine looking burgers and a cartoon cow smiling at the bottom.    
  
“Know what you want?”    
  
“You know I’m a vegetarian right?”    
  
“Right, number 10 it is then,” she says.    
  
I scan the menu in an attempt to find number ten, but Carmilla is already rolling her window down and pressing the big red button on the panel. A squeaky, young voice on the other end sounds surprised that anyone’s in the lot. He takes our order and Carmilla looks over at me. Little, puffy faced me, with tears still drying on my cheeks.    
  
“And one of those big, chocolate chip cookie things,” she says into the speaker.    
  
There it is again, that fleeting moment, the time when she cares so much. I start to think about the fact that she asked me on a date. If maybe she cares more often than I can tell. If those moments are how she really feels. I get a sinking in my chest, and start to feel sick. I laughed at her, and here she is, taking me out for food.    
  
I look over at the sound of Carmilla’s seat going all the way back. She puts her feet up and out the window. She lets out a sigh and I can hear her leather seats move with her. I roll down my own window, dump out my boots, and then recline my own seat to put my feet on the dash.    
  
“You want me to get the food?” I offer.    
  
“I got it, I got like two value meals and extra fries,” she rejects.    
  
“You did technically save me tonight, so it’s the least I can do,” I offer again.    
  
“Don’t worry about it,” she rejects once more.    
  
We wait for the food with nothing but the radio between us. Radiohead lulls from the speakers and I wrap myself in the towel Carmilla gave me. I keep going to check my phone, only to have the screen never light up. Carmilla just lays there, head back, fingers perfectly patting the beat of each song against her stomach. I want to talk to her, to apologize for real, to thank her over and over. I open my mouth but hear roller blades against the pavement. A woman with stringy black hair rolls up to the window and drops off our food.    
  
“Veggie burger for you,” she says, handing me a wrapped ball of bread and sauce.    
  
“Two bacon burgers for me,” she says, dropping balls of grease into her own lap.    
  
“And a mountain of fries to share,” she says, sitting the bag on the console between us. She hands me my drink, grape soda, to repair all the times she’s stolen mine. I begin chugging and devouring and we seem to spend our time overly aware of each other.    
  
“Can I ask you something?” I ask between bites.    
  
“As long as it isn’t about my eating habits,” she says with grease dripping down her hands.    
  
“No,” I say. My words stir in my stomach and I try to gather my thoughts. I shouldn’t do it, but I have to. “When did you know you wanted to ask me out? I mean, not that I’m not flattered, or that maybe I wouldn’t want to too. Just that we spend most of our time seemingly hating each other so I guess I’m just confused.”   
  
Carmilla swallows hard and frowns as if she has enough to digest without questions. She reaches down and pulls the lever to sit up fully. She doesn’t look at me, but stares intently at the floor before her.    
  
“Remember when I first moved in?” she asks.    
  
“Yeah, of course,” I say.    
  
“Well, you had laid down the most elaborate set of rules for the place, and I was damn near ready to set myself up with a nice place out on the sidewalk,” she says.    
  
“Very romantic,” I groan.    
  
“I wasn’t finished,” she says.    
  
“Continue,” I say, sitting myself up and listening intently. I have my soda tightly grasped in my hands now, something to replace the popcorn I feel I should be holding.    
  
“I thought you were going to be awful. But, I was moving by myself, and I didn’t have anywhere else to go. So I thought I’d give it a shot. I moved everything into your apartment in the middle of fucking July and I was about dead when I got done.”    
  
“I do remember that, you looked like you’d had several heat strokes,” I say.    
  
“So I assume you also remember that you pulled together every fan you could find, made my an ice pack for my forehead, and set the living room up to help me cool down. Before I could even thank you, you were halfway down the block getting us ice cream and renting a movie for us to watch.”   
  
“Oh yeah! We watched Kick-Ass and you hid my eyes during the violent parts.”   
  
“Yeah, you were a wimp. Anyway, you did all that for me and I didn’t even have to say thank you. You just cared so much about a person you hadn’t even met. I wanted to do something for you, but by the time we knew each other better, all we did was fight.”    
  
“Yeah, not exactly the breeding ground for romance,” I agree.    
  
“So from the beginning, I have wanted to ask you on a date, and haven’t gotten the chance because we’d rather fight about whose turn it is to do the dishes.”   
  
I pause for a long time. It’s my fault, really. I’m hard on her, not that she doesn’t deserve it. She doesn’t clean up after herself, she leaves everything in the wrong place, I don’t even want to think about our shower drain. I sigh and my head hits the headrest with a light thud.    
  
“I really am sorry,” is all I say.    
  
“Just maybe ease up on the whole chore wheel thing,” she replies.    
  
“I just like things neat and tidy,” I say with an uneasy tone.    
  
“I know,” she says with a light chuckle.    
  
“I’ll take away the chore wheel, but you have to start cleaning out the shower drain,” I say.    
  
“I can live with that,” she replies.    
  
We enjoy this silence. How it feels as if boulders have been taken off each of our backs. This sort of peace between us is strange, but so nice. I look over at her to see if she feels the same. I find her with a slight smile on her face, looking out the window as if she’s remembering a long lost imaginary friend. Nostalgia, peace. It draws me closer, inching toward her. My heart hits my chest like a toy hammer. She looks over at just the wrong time and instead of her cheek, my lips hit hers. She doesn’t pull away and neither do I. We just sit there with a gentle grasp on each other.    
  
I pull away when the heat in my face grows too intense. My cheeks must be red. Carmilla smiles wide with a certain look in her eyes. A look that says she’s gotten everything she wants, like she’s over the moon and back again with a souvenir in hand.   
  
“Let’s get you into some dry clothes,” she says, throwing her trash into the bag between us.    
  
“That would be nice,” I say. I toss my trash into the bag and sit my cup in the holder. “And Carmilla?”    
  
“Hmm?”    
  
“This was a really nice first date.”    
  
She shines with that smile again, remembering something about me, I hope. She reaches over to grab my hand and I feel my face heat up as we pull out of the parking space.    
  
“Yeah it was, cupcake, yeah it was.”    
  
And with that, we head for home.

**Author's Note:**

> Kudos and comments appreciated!


End file.
